Civil and Human Rights

The call for backup went out to local police just after 8 a.m. There was a shootout underway at a ranch in the western reaches of Michoacan state and the federal authorities needed help. One patrolman said he sped with his colleagues from a town 20 minutes away and arrived at the scene Friday to see bullets flying and military and police helicopters hovering overhead in what would become the deadliest confrontation with suspected cartel members in recent memory. "It looked like a battlefield," the officer said Saturday, speaking on condition of anonymity like everyone at the scene. The bloodshed at the private ranch left 42 suspected criminals dead, and one federal police...

Related "Civil and Human Rights" Articles

On the day after the April 9, 1865, surrender at Appomattox Court House in Virginia, Abraham Lincoln appeared at a second-floor window of the White House. He was acceding to the wishes of citizens who had gathered to serenade their president in this...

A Muhlenberg College student has put the Allentown school in the middle of a burgeoning campus movement by resigning as president of its Hillel chapter over the international group's restrictions on hosting speakers who are critical of Israel.
Senior...

The Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, used to say that theology is the work of understanding our religious situation. Our religious situation today is complex, and one of the most important reasons for that complexity are the many and diverse...

The world should be watching the crisis in Ukraine, Yuriy Sergeyev, Ukraine's ambassador to the United Nations, told a lunch-time audience Friday in downtown Allentown. It isn't a national or regional issue, he stressed to a packed house at the...

PHILADELPHIA — The vast majority of federal correctional officers are being equipped with pepper spray, a tool their colleagues in a pilot program say has been a game-changer in prisons where inmates have long tilted the balance of order with shivs and...

I initially didn't pay much attention to the recent announcement that a Berks County trucking company had discriminated against an employee because she was pregnant.
I found it sad but considered it an anomaly. I hadn't seen other recent examples. Surely...

Dr. Ihor Fedoriw knows people in the Lehigh Valley will want to talk to his friend.
The Allentown optometrist has known Yuriy Sergeyev, the Ukrainian ambassador to the United Nations, for many years.
And though his friend has been to Allentown many...

As the bishop of the Eastern Pennsylvania Conference of The United Methodist Church, I believe that discrimination laws do not hinder religious freedom, contrary to the perspective in Dean Browning's Your View ("Freedom of speech, religion under...

Germany and a leading anti-corporal punishment group on Friday rejected as "unacceptable" the pope's comments that it's OK to spank your children to discipline them, as long as their dignity is maintained.In his general audience this week,...

YES: Criminals should not be free to torment victims from prison, a state lawmaker says.
Q: Why is it necessary to limit what convicts can say?
A: I believe the more important question is: Why it is so important to protect the victims of crime in...

The discovery in a Center Valley home last fall of the highest radon reading ever in Pennsylvania has its roots in a mystery that started in Berks County almost 30 years ago.For Brian Redmond, professor of geology and chemistry in Wilkes University's...

With worldwide government officials and the media all over the outrage caused by the violent terroristic reaction to depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, it's interesting how little negative press Saudi Arabia is getting for flogging a blogger who insulted...

Judicial elections are idiotic, but 38 states (including Pennsylvania) have them in some form. The U.S. Supreme Court grappled Tuesday with the contradiction inherent in using the electoral process to select public officials whose primary obligation is to...

In the wake of the terrorist attack on a kosher market in Paris, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu asked French Jews to come home.I don't particularly like that advice. I think it would be a tragedy if centuries of Jewish French culture had to die...

The U.S. campaign finance system is badly broken and desperately in need of new solutions.
In 5-4 rulings in Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, five years ago Wednesday in 2010, and McCutcheon vs. Federal Election Commission, in 2014,...

Republicans, who now run Congress, say they want to cooperate with President Barack Obama and point to the administration's Trans-Pacific Partnership as the model. The only problem is that the TPP would be a disaster.If you haven't heard much about the...

Pennsylvania's mandatory lifetime registration requirement for the worst juvenile sex offenders is unconstitutional because it assumes all children convicted of sex crimes are likely to commit similar crimes in the future, the state Supreme Court...

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WASHINGTON – Dr. Oscar Morffi, a Cuban-born pediatrician, hasn't been back to his native country since he was 14.
His father was a political prisoner under former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and when Morffi left Cuba, he didn't see the family he left...

An aquatic ecosystem that supports a host of creatures and is linked to water supplies for hundreds of its neighbors will soon have its day in court.
Residents say the Little Mahoning Creek watershed in Indiana County is threatened by frackwater...